I picked up a PC from one of my co-workers recently. It’s an older P4, with a bit of ram, a decent ATI dual-display video card etc… But it has 2 beautiful 22″ LCD monitors. After spending late evenings the past few days, I finally have it set up in a way I like.
I got this computer so I would have a decent machine to work on at home. I do quite a bit of development and planning and other stuff for work, and using my 13″ macbook just didn’t cut it for home use. So I’ve decided to dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu 8.10. Windows for any windows specific work-apps I need, and for the occaional game playing, but then Ubuntu for my powerhouse multi-tasking workbox. In the office I use an iMac running MacOS Leopard with dual 24″ monitors and I LOVE it. So Ubuntu with the dual 22″ should be quite similar without actually buying a mac for home.
It took quite a few hours to get the video driver done up right so I could actually get 3d accelleration, at full resolution (3360×1050) across both displays. Once that was set up, I configured Compiz-Fusion and a couple other Gnome Tweaks to get the system looking really nice. With the addition of the Avant Window Navigator (a Dock-like application) Ubuntu really started to feel like MacOS.
The last thing I need to do is get my LAMP stack configured for dev testing, get subversion installed, and find an editor I can get used to (I’m used to TextMate on MacOS). Then I can checkout the current code trunk and spend my late-night code hacking sessions at home, rather than at the office.
